Over-the-cover fight

Viktor Yushchenko called on the Ukrainian people to cancel the constitutional reform in the referendum

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko will not take radical steps to resolve the conflict with the Verkhovna Rada, which dismissed the government on January 10. In particular, he does not intend to introduce direct presidential rule in the country and dissolve the Rada. “So that there are not many myths circulating around the country, I guarantee that the president will not violate the constitution or the law,” Mr. Yushchenko said in a television interview on January 13. This, he said, “is the strength of democracy.”

“The president does not have any legal authority to dissolve the Rada, even experts from the presidential apparatus agree with this,” Vladimir Fesenko, head of the Ukrainian Penta center, told Vremya Novostei. The term “direct presidential rule,” in his opinion, is more journalistic than legal in nature. Therefore, all statements about the threat of dissolution of parliament, which are made either by the opposition or by the president’s supporters, are “nothing more than pre-election rhetoric,” the expert believes.

In a television interview on January 13, President Yushchenko sharply criticized the concept of political reform, adopted at the end of Leonid Kuchma's presidency and which came into force on January 1, 2006. The reform redistributed part of the presidential powers in favor of the Rada. According to Yushchenko, the crisis of January 10, caused by the parliament's decision to dismiss the government, was caused by ill-conceived and unbalanced constitutional reform. The president considers the actions of parliament irresponsible, because even according to the new version of the constitution, the Rada did not have the opportunity to form a new cabinet before the parliamentary elections, which will take place in March 2006. In fact, two months before the elections, the Rada left a country of fifty million without a government. “The fifth column, for which personal interests are more important than national ones,” was pushing Ukraine “into political ungovernability,” Mr. Yushchenko said. According to him, the actions of the deputies are nothing more than a “free, stupid anti-state policy”, under which “the country will have a difficult future.”

The constitutional changes were carried out “under the carpet,” “secretly from the nation,” the president emphasized. According to him, those forces in the Rada who were elected under Kuchma and “lost the ideological support of voters” did this. In this regard, he announced his intention to hold a referendum to review political reform. “I will certainly come up with this idea so that no one has any doubts,” he assured. However, there is a threat of superimposing a referendum on the 2006 parliamentary elections, which could further destabilize the situation in the country. Earlier, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Anatoly Kinakh said that a referendum on amendments to the constitution could take place in the second half of 2006.

“In October 2005, the constitutional court explained that changes in the constitutional system should be completed by a national referendum,” Mr. Fesenko explained to Vremya Novostei. This referendum is what the president has in mind. At the same time, according to the newspaper's interlocutor, this step makes sense for the president only if the new Rada, elected in March 2006, is unable to form a government and is dissolved. Then Yushchenko, citing the incapacity of parliament and the inconsistency of the amendments, will be able to count on the support of public opinion. If the Rada succeeds in forming a government, the position of Mr. Yushchenko's opponents will strengthen, and they will turn the constitutional referendum, in essence, into a vote of confidence in the current president.

The president's main opponent, Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, believes that political reform is beneficial to the president, since it makes him an arbiter over the battle. However, the presidential team is not interested in reform, since it now has the opportunity to “lead and give basic instructions” on his behalf and on his instructions. Today in Ukraine, “some politicians live according to the old constitution, others - according to the new one, and still others - according to the one that exists in their heads,” Mr. Lytvyn believes.

“Politicians who comment on the resignation of the government and constitutional reform do not always understand the legal subtleties of the issue,” Mr. Fesenko believes. Any replacement of ministers in the government is impossible before the March parliamentary elections. The fact is that amendments to the constitution deprived the president of the power to appoint members of the government, and parliament will receive such a right only after new elections. The absurdity of the situation is precisely that it is virtually impossible to solve the “personnel” problem by the end of May, the expert is convinced. At the same time, there is a clear false start by the president’s opponents. By putting the country in a stalemate due to the dismissal of the government, they gave Mr. Yushchenko “political trump cards” to review constitutional reform in the near future, noted Vremya Novostey’s interlocutor.

Svetlana STEPANENKO, Kyiv